Interesting tech but there’s zero explanation of the actual application, so it’s all a little abstract.
nancyminusone · 1h ago
>I’m saving approximately $84-120 CAD annually.
I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.
behnamoh · 46m ago
This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app?
When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price.
I'm a longtime Apple user but can't shake off this love-hate relationship with the company.
aerostable_slug · 36m ago
I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission. I'm not sure a hundred bucks is the right number, but it's not fair to say all they do is host the file.
rahimnathwani · 1m ago
You have to pay $99/year even if you only want to use the app on your own device.
You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days.
They don't need to test an app if you're not asking them to distribute it through their store.
notnmeyer · 35m ago
i’d guess it’s more to keep extremely low effort submissions out of the app store.
procinct · 1h ago
I believe you only have to pay to put your app on the App Store. I’ve made apps for my iPhone before and never had to pay.
mcpherrinm · 44m ago
It's the "for longer than a week" bit - Unless you have a paid developer account, you can only sign apps to sideload that last one week.
There's some tools to automate "refreshing" the app, but that requires you have some other computer that pushes a new app every week.
The "1 week" restriction is usually fine when you're developing (as you typically are continually rebuilding and updating when actively working on an app) but is clearly intended to avoid being a way to sideload apps without the developer account "nearby".
tech234a · 36m ago
If you trust it, SideStore manages to do it on device by using a local VPN to make an on-device server appear to be an external device on the network.
sheepscreek · 43m ago
I’m not a 100% on this, but I believe you need to pay them to “sign” your app. For iOS, that means there is no way anyone else will be able to use your app unless they side-load it themselves (and we all know how cumbersome that is, Apple doesn’t want to make it easy).
notnmeyer · 34m ago
correct
jdon · 3h ago
Soon you'll also be able to do speech to text locally, as Apple is adding a SpeechAnalyzer API [0] which is apparently faster than whisper [1].
A CLI for on-device speech transcription using Speech.framework on macOS 26
The MacStories article made it seem about 2x as fast as Whisper, but there's no network or shared servers involved, so it's effectively faster.
etra0 · 1h ago
This reminded me of the guy that built a meme database using iPhone's OCR as well [1].
I find incredible the idea of giving these devices another life. I wonder how hard is to host a sort-of vps on an abandoned android phone these days... I guess as long as you can put ethernet + docker you'd have a very capable device.
>We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking.
I'm not sure I follow. It feels exceedingly hard to find new uses for old iPads without doing a lot of heavy lifting. Has that changed?
jerlam · 17m ago
For me, iPads (base model, non-Air/Pro) and iPhones seem to exist on opposite ends of the longevity spectrum. Never had an iPad last over 2-3 years without feeling sluggish and ready for an upgrade. Never had an iPhone since the 4 that felt sluggish when Apple stopped supporting it (5+ years).
brailsafe · 1h ago
My iPad 3 is only unusable because anything beyond iOS 9 isn't installable, most of the like 5 Apps I did have installed on it didn't survive a "backup", and obvs nobody's going out of their way to support ancient platforms.
Otherwise, it still functions as an epub reader as long as iBooks continues functioning, but it's lame that I can't really use it for much else unless I made it a hobby.
tech234a · 33m ago
As a counterexample, VLC surprisingly still supports iOS 9.0
yegle · 14m ago
This still requires a mini PC to bridge the API call and the iOS app.
I wonder if the new Android 16 terminal app would allow combining both.
ideashower · 2h ago
I'm confused. What are you OCR'ing that requires a solution like this? What images are you processing?
wing-_-nuts · 2h ago
I loved the 'it turns out I'm an indoor cat with outdoor aspirations'. I often joke I'm an 'avid indoorsman'
I wonder if someone will make a LLM farm from older (probably not too old) iPhones using Apple's new foundation models. I know they won't hold a candle to SOTA models, they are much smaller for one, but when they announced API access that's the first thing I thought of, a sort of "folding @ home" but routing queries to a phone and spitting back the results.
It's silly and probably makes no sense at all based on how weak the model will probably be but it's a fun thing to think about.
romain_batlle · 1h ago
nop probably a very bad idea even if you had enough iPhones and you could parallelise them, it would be 10x less electricity efficient
laurensr · 1h ago
In my browser the ads cover the actual content.
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
nickburns · 1h ago
I found the page quite clean (with cloudflareinsights.com, googlesyndication.com, and googletagmanager.com blocked of course).
jiqiren · 1h ago
HomePods perform real-time vision processing on multiple camera streams for HomeKit. However, the primary quality challenge lies in the video quality of HomeKit-enabled doorbell cameras that can consistently stream to Wi-Fi. For instance, my doorbell operates on 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, resulting in highly compressed video streams. This compression likely impacts the results.
cosmic_cheese · 1h ago
The range of HomeKit-enabled doorbells and cameras is disappointing to begin with and even worse when removing options that require a proprietary adapter box and/or subscription. The best option at the moment seems to be a Ubiquiti setup that integrates into HomeKit by way of Homebridge or other similar solutions rather than anything that supports HomeKit specifically.
mmmlinux · 2h ago
Maybe i'm missing something. Where are these thousands of users coming from? is this some service you offer?
redundantly · 2h ago
I love projects like this, doing things because you can. Especially low power, off-grid projects.
However I did not love the writing style of this article. Lots of repetition. Asking questions to stress a funny point. Lots of repetition.
I don't mean to sound like a jerk, even though I've succeeded at it. The author is cool, what they did is just as cool.
rbinv · 1h ago
It's AI slop. In fact, most (if not all) of this blog's recent posts are AI slop.
troupo · 34m ago
> Welcome to my corner of the internet! I’m Hemant, a Senior Software Engineer based in Canada . I’m passionate about cloud computing, DevOps, and building robust distributed systems.
Somehow you're also passionate about selling user data to hundreds of data brokers with no easy way to opt-out
tootie · 1h ago
I have an ancient ipad that is still functional but stuck on iOS 9. Xcode doesn't let you target that version anymore. Is it still possible to compile an ipa for devices out of support?
daneel_w · 57m ago
It's a painfully sluggish alternative, but you can run older versions of OS X (and thus Xcode) in VirtualBox.
WalterGR · 12m ago
On Apple x86 hardware: Running Windows in VMWare Fusion works very, very well. I can’t see a reason why that wouldn't also be the case for old versions of OS X, though admittedly I haven’t tried.
It’s curious to me that OS X in VirtualBox is sluggish. Both VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox use virtualization…
hagbard_c · 2h ago
I see your fruitPhone 8 and raise my Motorola MB525 'Defy', Motorola MB526 'Defy+' and Samsung J3 which are in use as Wifi-enabled trailer camera. The phones provide a Wifi hotspot through which the camera's images are accessed. Hook up the trailer, connect to the Wifi network and voila, you can see what's happening in the trailer behind you. The oldest device in this list is from 2010, all of them run either Cyanogenmod (MB525 and MB526) or its successor LineageOS (J3). I replaced the batteries in the Motorola's, the J3 runs on its original battery. Oh, all of them run without a screen since that is not visible anyway and was broken in 2 of the 3. Android runs just fine without a screen and using the things this way takes a little less power.
FlyingSnake · 1h ago
That’s pretty impressive. I love when people give old devices a new life and save them from being eWaste. True to the hacker spirit.
I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.
When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price.
I'm a longtime Apple user but can't shake off this love-hate relationship with the company.
You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days.
They don't need to test an app if you're not asking them to distribute it through their store.
There's some tools to automate "refreshing" the app, but that requires you have some other computer that pushes a new app every week.
The "1 week" restriction is usually fine when you're developing (as you typically are continually rebuilding and updating when actively working on an app) but is clearly intended to avoid being a way to sideload apps without the developer account "nearby".
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/277/
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/18/apple-transcription-api...
I find incredible the idea of giving these devices another life. I wonder how hard is to host a sort-of vps on an abandoned android phone these days... I guess as long as you can put ethernet + docker you'd have a very capable device.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34315782
We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking.
I have a similar story wherein I repurposed my ancient OG iPhone SE and gave it a new life.
https://samkhawase.com/blog/dumb-smartphone/
I'm not sure I follow. It feels exceedingly hard to find new uses for old iPads without doing a lot of heavy lifting. Has that changed?
Otherwise, it still functions as an epub reader as long as iBooks continues functioning, but it's lame that I can't really use it for much else unless I made it a hobby.
I wonder if the new Android 16 terminal app would allow combining both.
It's silly and probably makes no sense at all based on how weak the model will probably be but it's a fun thing to think about.
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
However I did not love the writing style of this article. Lots of repetition. Asking questions to stress a funny point. Lots of repetition.
I don't mean to sound like a jerk, even though I've succeeded at it. The author is cool, what they did is just as cool.
Somehow you're also passionate about selling user data to hundreds of data brokers with no easy way to opt-out
It’s curious to me that OS X in VirtualBox is sluggish. Both VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox use virtualization…